USG Provides First Official Statement on Montevideo, Brazil, and ITU Plenipotentiary

The United States government (USG) has provided its first official reaction to the October 2013 Montevideo Statement issued by organizations responsible for coordination of the Internet technical infrastructure, the upcoming April Internet governance conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil , as well as other matters related to Internet governance -- including the ITU Plenipotentiary meeting scheduled for October in Busan, South Korea. more

Comcast’s Impressive System for Notifying Infected Users

Pretty much as long as there've been computers, one of the biggest challenges has been user education. How do you create software smart enough to inform a user when they're about to do something potentially disastrous - or, worse, when something disastrous has been done to them? As one of the world's largest access providers, Comcast has put a ton of thought into developing a notification system for their users. The solution Comcast developed involves, in effect, hijacking HTTP requests... more

Brad Templeton in Response to Site Finder Controversy

A harmful, highly unilateral and capricious action. Tons of software out there depended on the ability to tell the difference between a domain name which exists and does not. They use that to give a meaningful, locally defined error to the user, or to identify if an E-mail address will work or not before sending the mail. Many used it as a way to tag spam (which came from domains that did not exist). It is the local software that best knows how to deal with the error. more

A Digital ‘Red Cross’

A look into the past reveals that continuous developments in weaponry technology have been the reason for arms control conventions and bans. The banning of the crossbow by Pope Urban II in 1096, because it threatened to change warfare in favour of poorer peasants, the banning of poisoned bullets in 1675 by the Strasbourg Agreement, and the Geneva protocol banning the use of biological and chemical weapons in 1925 after world war 1, all prove that significant technological developments have caused the world to agree not to use certain weapons. more

IP Address Information Misused by Authorities Says EFF, Not Enough to Justify Police Raids

"Law Enforcement, Courts Need to Better Understand IP Addresses, Stop Misuse," says EFF in whitepaper released on Thursday. more

DNS Inventor Impressed With Innovative Effort Behind .LUXE TLD to Integrate DNS With Blockchain

The company running the new .LUXE top-level domain (TLD) recently issued an update on its progress with the innovative effort to tie the TLD with blockchain. more

DotConnectAfrica Trust Response to John Jeffrey’s ICANN Legal Blog Posting

The attention of DotConnectAfrica Trust (DCA Trust) has been drawn to a recent blog posting by John Jeffrey, the ICANN General Counsel and Company Secretary, who wrote to clarify what he termed as "misinformation and erroneous reporting that have framed parts of the discussion" regarding the recent DCA vs. ICANN IRP Final Declaration. As we can't see a way of making comments on his blog, DCA Trust as a directly affected party, will respond to the issues Mr. Jeffrey has advanced... more

Two More Crypto Holes

If you work in computer security, your Twitter feed and/or Inbox has just exploded with stories about not just one but two new holes in cryptographic protcols. One affects WiFi; the other affects RSA key pair generation by certain chips. How serious are these? I'm not going to go through the technical details. For KRACK, Matthew Green did an excellent blog post; for the other, full details are not yet available. There are also good articles on each of them. What's more interesting are the implications. more

What New gTLD Applicants Need Is a Quick, Lightweight Answer to the World’s Governments. Here It Is.

It's safe to say that with just a week to go before ICANN intended to sign the first contract for a new gTLD, the last thing anyone wanted was a 12-page document from the world's governments with 16 new "safeguards", six of which it wants to see applied to every new extension. But what the industry shouldn't overlook, especially in the face of the expected critical responses this week and next, is that the Governmental Advisory Committee's (GAC's) formal advice from the ICANN Beijing meeting represents an opportunity for the domain name industry to lock-in self-regulation at a critical point in its evolution. more

Let’s Face Facts: We Need a New Industrial Internet

The Internet is a great success and an abject failure. We need a new and better one. Let me explain why. We are about to enter an era when online services are about to become embedded into pretty much every activity in life. We will become extremely dependent on the safe and secure functioning of the underlying infrastructure. Whole new industries are waiting to be born as intelligent machines, widespread robotics, and miniaturized sensors are everywhere. more

Potential Impacts of Large-Scale Metaverses on Internet Governance: Bandwidth

Neal Stephenson’s foundational cyberpunk novel Snow Crash brought to the public the concept of a metaverse, a virtual reality in which people interact using avatars in a manufactured ecosystem, eschewing the limitations of human existence. More recently, Ready Player One capitalized on that idea and brought it back to prominence with a bestselling novel and subsequent film adaptation. Amid rebranding efforts and seeking a new way forward, Mark Zuckerberg has made it Facebook’s (now Meta Platforms) priority to build a platform that could enable the metaverse to become a mainstream technology with the sort of reach that their social networks and WhatsApp have. more

IP Address Management as a Service on the Cloud

Consumption of software as a service with a usage-based business model has gained incredible popularity in recent years. On the other hand, other cloud services such as infrastructure and platform as a service are just starting to pick up. While compute and storage are by the far the most commonly used cloud infrastructure services, few consider core network services such as IP Address Management (IPAM) as something that could be utilized over the cloud. more

Why is .EU Trying to Destroy the Internet?

Eurid, the operator of .EU, announced that it was cutting its wholesale price from 10 Euros to 5 Euros (about US$6.40 at today's rate). Is Eurid crazy? They're cutting the price in half! Eurid is acting as if unit cost should go down as sales increase! Haven't they learned the lesson... more

North American Saw Complete Exhaustion of IPv4 Address Space Inventory in Q3, 2015

Akamai Technologies today released its Third Quarter, 2015 State of the Internet Report with updates on IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 adoption. more

Worm Propagation Strategies in an Ipv6 Internet

A recent paper called "Worm Propagation Strategies in an IPv6 Internet", written by Steven M. Bellovin, Angelos Keromytis, and Bill Cheswick, examines whether or not the deployment of IPv6 will in fact provide a substantial level of barrier against worms. Shared below are the introductory paragraphs from this paper. "In recent years, the internet has been plagued by a number of worms. One popular mechanism that worms use to detect vulnerable targets is random IP address-space probing..." more